Rachel Watanabe-Batton

Rachel Watanabe-Batton is founder of Contradiction and Struggle, a production and consulting company dedicated to telling authentic stories that reframe historical and cultural narratives. Watanabe-Batton is Chair of Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) and co-founder of Women Independent Producers (WIP). She serves on the Board of Directors of New York Women in Film & Television (NYWIFT) and Board of Representatives of the Producers Guild of America East (PGA). She has been honored with the MADE IN NY Award by Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment Commissioner Cynthia Lopez for her contributions as Chair of PGA East Diversity (2008-2018) and founding co-chair of PGA Women's Impact Network (2014-2018). Watanabe-Batton graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and has a B.A. from Harvard University in Visual and Environmental Studies and Sociology. After university, she moved westward and got a temporary job at Danny Glover's Carrie Productions in Burbank, CA while working part-time at the Los Angeles County Museum. Her familiarity with LACMA's house jazz band prompted her to invite a couple of producers to join her at legendary drummer Billy Higgins' The World Stage in Crenshaw's Leimert Park, likely landing her first full-time gig in creative development with veteran Hollywood producers Paula Weinstein and Mark Rosenberg at Spring Creek Productions on the Warner Bros lot. This led to assisting acclaimed Australian director Peter Weir (Fearless). Her time at Spring Creek coincided with the height of the influential Hollywood Women's Political Committee, 1992 March on Washington, and the L.A. Rebellion aka L.A Riots, following which she led and introduced Hollywood producers and actors during a permitted mass demonstration in Beverly Hills against police brutality and racist deportations. Watanabe-Batton is a producing partner of legendary film director Julie Dash on multiple film and television projects, and has produced films with acclaimed auteur directors Tanya Hamilton (The Killers), The Polish Brothers (Bajo del Perro), Mo Ogrodnik (Ripe), and led Magnolia Pictures niche marketing campaign for Hamilton's celebrated feature film Night Catches Us with Kerry Washington and Anthony Mackie. She co-founded the production company Department of Film at Goldcrest Post with Nick Quested, executive producing music videos with iconic recording artists like Nas and Diddy. She has produced original content for many celebrities including entrepreneur/chef Martha Stewart, actor Hugh Jackman and athlete/host Gabrielle Reece, and line produced I Pity the Fool, a reality series starring Mr. T for Left/Right TV/Lionsgate and HBO/Showtime documentary Cutting Edge on politics in a Harlem barber shop. As a commercial and promos producer, she has helmed major award-winning international ad campaigns for brands like Olay, Miller Lite, Retail Me Not, Samsung and Viacom, and managed production and art departments for hundreds of commercials and music videos for companies including 1st Ave Machine, Station Films, Radical Media, RSA, FM Rocks and Propaganda Films. Watanabe-Batton's directing credits include the short film, Once You're In about an undocumented Irish immigrant couple in Boston marrying for a green card, which she wrote, directed and produced with photographer-filmmaker Lauren Greenfield and features narration by Seamus Heaney, 1995 Irish Nobel laureate in literature. The film was supported by funding from The Ford Foundation and Education for Action and aired on WGBH. She has also received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, National Association of Latino Independent Producers, Vision Maker Media and Black Public Media. She produced and co-directed the documentary Crisis in the Crib for the U.S. Office of Minority Health on infant mortality, which shows the impact racial discrimination has on low birth outcomes. Her American Identity series for Global Hue puts Harvard Professor Homi K. Bhabha's hybrid-cultural-identity theory into practice featuring interviews with diverse artists and scholars following the election of President Obama. Her MTV Africa music video "Incomplete" and behind-the-scenes episode for Ghanaian hip-life artist Tinny won an MTV Award on the continent; and her Miami frat video "Play No Games," for recording artist and mega producer Lil Jon stayed in top-ten rotation for several weeks. Born in New York City, during early childhood she lived in a log cabin in the woods of the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont, then on a Catholic Worker Farm in Western Massachusetts with her adopted/foster Swedish family who are renowned stained glass makers. She returned to city life as a toddler, and grew up in the Lower East Side and Co-op City in the Northeast Bronx with her mother, African American step Dad (who taught her to love old movies and language) and sisters surrounded by an extended family of multi-cultural progressive educators and activists. Her spirit and commitment come from her Japanese American mother who was interned as an infant with her family in the relocation "camps" at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during WW II, her Igbo father who is a sociologist and whose family survived the genocide in Nigeria during the Biafran War. The two met in graduate school at Columbia University. That collective heritage gave her a clear understanding that branding can change one from an "enemy alien" to "model minority" in a lifetime. Storytelling has the power to create compassion and freedom or bias and fear.